Trump Won the Election

I am from the United States. If you didn’t know, there was recently a presidential election. We in the US vote every four years on November 8th.

The election is now over. The two candidates where Hilary Clinton for the Democrats and Donald J. Trump for the republicans. To win the election, you have to win 270 electoral vote(I’ll talk about that in another piece). Donald Trump eventually met that mark by reaching 279 electoral votes, and may still rack in a few more votes as the final counts come in. Clinton got 228. The election was really, really close.

So what happened? I think that everyone, even the Trump people, underestimated the amount of influence the anti-establishment feeling of the voters in this country. A lot of people were will willing to take a chance and vote for Trump. So that angry portion of the vote was bigger than we thought.

The second point is something that I think all the mainstream media just can’t grasp. Everyone else outside of the mainstream press had at least a sense of this. A lot of people in this country, for rational and irrational reasons, dislike and distrust Hilary Clinton. It turned out that this feeling was much more significant than even people who don’t give the Democrat establishment any breaks expected.

The next point is that a lot of voters who were against Hilary did not mind the rhetoric that Trump ran on. I think there absolutely is a pocket of Trump voters who don’t mind a political candidate who makes statements against minorities. This is unfortunate, because it is a misdirection of some very legitimate grievances against people of a different background than you.

I think that the angry pro-Trump vote was a lot bigger than anyone expected.

I am going to write a few more posts on this, but to end this post:

I am a left-winger. I’m on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Trump and his supporters. But I hope his supporters are right.

If Trump really does improve America, fantastic. If Trump can actually reduce the debt, protect social welfare programs for the people who need it, ensure through constitutional means that the United States is safe, help to slow climate change, make sure that marginalized groups in the US are protected, fund education, be accepting towards immigrants who need help, come up with a health care policy where all Americans can see a doctor without being broke afterwards, and maintain diplomatic relations with other countries, along with all the other important policies that will actually help America, that would fantastic.

But Trump needs to show that he will do these policies.

So far, the rhetoric that got him to win was divisive, fear based, and not what the US, a country full of people who came in from other nations, needs to actually improve together.